Do you like to gamble?

When it comes to back-up and disaster recovery strategies, many small and medium sized businesses say they have it under control. They save their files onto an external hard drive every Friday and take it home. Or the managing partner’s nephews (who created their network) said everything is good to go. Some even believe none of their data is important enough to be backed up, so they don’t bother.

There will always be businesses that get lucky and never experience a data loss. But how do you know you’ll be one of them?

According to Seagate, 20% of companies storing between 2-7 TB of data (which is the majority of small and medium businesses), will experience a data loss. Of that 20%, more than half will experience multiple data losses in one year.

At a glance these statistics indicates a 1 in 5 chance of experiencing a data loss. Until you take a closer look at what it costs to produce a document:

Let’s say you are an attorney drafting a contract for a client. You spend approximately 2 hours corresponding with the clients about what they need in the contract, then another 3 hours drafting and formatting before sending the document to a paralegal for another hour of revisions. So far you have 6 hours of work in this contract. You bill at $250/hr. and the paralegal is billed at $75/hr., bringing the total cost to produce this document to $1325.

Now let’s assume that just as you are about to send that finalized contract to the client, your company experiences a data loss event: fire, flood, hardware failure, virus or theft. There were no backups in place, so all the work you just completed is wiped out. You get to redo everything. Piecing together your notes, it only takes you 3 hours to reproduce the contract. That’s another $750. Who pays that bill? Is that passed along to the client? Odds are no. Your company eats that cost and loses $750 on just one document.

Now imagine you lost 10,000 documents. You can see how quickly these costs get out of control.

You may think this could never happen to you. The reality is, we have already seen this happen to several of our clients this year. One was hit with a new malware virus that encrypted over 30,000 documents on their server. Luckily, we had a backup solution in place and they did not lose a single piece of data. What if those documents weren’t backed up? If each document cost $100 to reproduce, that’s a $3 million loss, which most small and medium sized businesses would find tough to recoup.

Now compare the cost of a data loss to the cost of having your data backed up routinely by a professional. Then ask yourself, “Do I like to gamble?”

We hope your answer is “no,” and that like our clients, you never have to spend a minute worrying about data loss. Call us today and let’s talk about a back-up system that gives you a sure thing.